Reviewed by Warren Maxwell

Melding poetic forms, candid conversations, and calls against injustice, these poems are confessional, communal, rage-filled, compassionate, and above all, kind.

Melding poetic forms, candid conversations, and calls against injustice, these poems are confessional, communal, rage-filled, compassionate, and above all, kind.

“Dustin’s instinct is to argue against the compliment—that’s life with a narcissist parent. He (begrudgingly ) writes thank you.”

Zooming into the experiences, frustrations, and joys of modern life with a magnifying glass, the slim volume of poetry, Repeat As Needed, offers validation, commiseration, and critique of the way we live our lives.

In a fingerprint-like poetic voice that captures the unique cadences and peculiarities of the author, poems like “Things That Definitely Suck” list the myriad awfulnesses that one encounters on a day-to-day basis, or once in a lifetime, in one foreboding block of text .

“Stuck on a Ferris wheel with a full bladder. Missing buttons. Chipping a tooth. A dust allergy. Misogyny.”

Elsewhere, poems are minimalistic haikus, elegant villanelles, literal conversations traded back and forth with other poets, and quixotic repartees against the cliched comments that heterosexual people make about homosexuality. The diversity of form is thrilling, but it’s the poetic voice winding through each piece that makes this an enthralling read.

“Sob.
Sob until God fears
you’ll one up His flood.”

Each poem in Repeat As Needed is accompanied by a subheading that name-checks an inspiration or literary jumping off point. This in itself creates a beautiful sense of poetic lineage and history—it is a collection very much in touch with contemporaries and forbearers.

When viewed in combination with the two explicit conversation poems (“Dustin Wants To Write A Poem With Caridad” and “Dustin Wants To Write A Poem With Nicole”) that trade block paragraphs between Brookshire and another poet—each poet writing about themselves in the third person—this collection takes on the aspect of a community. Many voices are drawn into contact with Brookshire’s. The lively chatter between poets and thinkers actively performs some of the values that become apparent in the collection’s denunciations of homophobia, misogyny, and discrimination of all stripes.

“When I was straight,
my father would say,
I’d rather one of my sons
blow my brains out
than tell me he’s gay.”

Among the real pleasures of reading these poems is discovering the way poetic form and the uses of concrete space inflect a voice. Brookshire’s voice doesn’t falter in navigating brutalist blocks of text, slim lines of repetition, and meandering, minor epic stories of being frightened by religious tales as a child. Yet, each new structure on the page brings out another aspect of Brookshire’s language. There is the heavy potency of a poem that can simply declare “All we had was lust” and let those lines resonate alone on the page. Then there’s the prolix excitement of a voice that loves speaking and free associating as we see in “Things That Definitely Suck” and the conversation poems. Through different forms, the different faces of the poet come into beautiful relief.

A passionate, richly articulated snapshot of life, poetic community, and the many identities that are wrapped up in a single individual, Repeat As Needed is a gorgeous poetry collection.

Thank you for reading Warren Maxwell’s book review of Repeat As Needed by Dustin Brookshire! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Toni Woodruff

A warmhearted picture book about healing through grief together

How do you explain loss to a child? Especially big loss. The biggest. Little Bear and the Big Hole has lost his Papa Bear, and there’s a hole where Papa used to stand. A real, literal hole. He sits at the edge of the hole and cries, looking into it and hating it day after day.

Nobody seems to see it other than him either, until Squirrel comes along. She walks carefully past it, sits down beside him, and glares into it. It turns out—she’s seen it before too, back when her sister died. Little Bear and the Big Hole by Jennifer Seal is the story of how Squirrel shows up for Little Bear, how Little Bear learns to accept the hole and pour love into it in order for life—new life—to emerge.

Children experience deep, complicated sadness even when we don’t think they’re ready for it. Life comes at everyone, unfortunately, and the possibility of death will greet them in stories, movies, and life early on. So how can we show them that there is hope and love beyond this sadness and grief?

If you’re going to read a book to your child about grief, make it this one. This is a powerful story with bighearted characters and concepts that demonstrate how grief isn’t the end of the road. It does hit you with the death of Papa Bear right away, so be ready to tackle it on page one.

The whole concept of the big hole is done to perfection. There’s something missing inside, and it’s almost impossible to avoid it. And yet, we look the same on the outside; no one can even tell you’re dealing with something so big.

But at least we have each other. This book is an important reminder that, even when it feels like we’re alone, we can still lean on other people. Squirrel is a terrifically loving character who doesn’t ask anything of Little Bear. She just sits with him, plays with him, talks with him, and tells him that what he’s doing is okay. She doesn’t say it’s going to get better. She lets time heal the big hole.

They create art and write letters and sing songs to the hole, filling it with the love\nthat’s missing now that Papa Bear is gone. There are real lessons to be learned in this moving story. Death and grief are big topics that will have to be broached at some point. If you or your little one feel ready, it’s important to read the right books and stories about it. Like this one.

The illustrations are colorful, creative, and clean, and they provide context to a story that depends on a metaphor to understand it on the deepest level. Jennifer Seal and illustrator Mirjam Siim have conjured up a special kind of magic with Little Bear and the Big Hole.

Thank you for reading Toni Woodruff’s book review of Little Bear and the Big Hole by Jennifer Seal! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

Queer Black women float, grieve, steal, sweat, and fight back in this thrilling connection of stories that put us first.

“Daisy’s mother tells her ways to stay safe, but they all come off as futile superstitions… Don’t go anywhere silent and gentle; leave marks, bite marks, claw marks, anything that can be evidence later.” In the first and titular tale of this short story collection, we meet Daisy, a young woman who can’t shake the disturbing truth of being a potential victim of violence every day of her life simply by existing. She “thinks of every pair of eyes that could have ever possibly raked across her body,” and does everything she can think of to make herself undesirable, to make people turn away from her. She stops washing and begins avoiding eye-contact, attempting to inspire disgust and disinterest as a means of self defense. It’s a desire every woman faced with these truths has considered, incorporating preventative tactics into our lives—knowing that nothing will ever be enough to protect ourselves from the ever-present threat of gender-based violence, but desperately needing to do something to try. 

As I write this review, there’s a collective sense of fear and hopelessness settling over women of color in South Africa, where I live, because of a recent murder of a young woman. But we still have to go to work, buy groceries, make our parents proud, fall in love. This is a reality for Black women: the reality of dating, the reality of being a mother, a daughter, a wife, a teenager who has a crush, the reality of living life day to day against the already crushing backdrop of classism, racism, and the infuriatingly familiar “quirks” of being noticed in public as Black and queer and whatever specific quality is all your own. 

Author Demree McGhee said “society’s violence against us is hell, but we deserve great fiction”—and gives us twisted, twisting tales that pull us in and take us on a ride we couldn’t possibly see coming. These stories are all so soaked in queerness and Blackness that the identity of our protagonist is always undeniable while they’re on myriad fictional rollercoasters.

Sympathy for Wild Girls explores class consciousness in young people; the tormenting shades of toxic masculinity; the delicate folds of female friendship; and the concept of desire as danger, as a road to death (threaded firmly and fiercely into many of the stories but also captured brilliantly by this line: “I didn’t know what to do with my body when it wanted. I only knew how to smother and scream in place of desire.”) 

Demree McGhee captures the elusive truth behind conversations between teenage girls, both filled with awe and simmering with heavy notes of comparison. She conveys the visceral sensuality of another woman applying your makeup while unpacking the difficulty in seeing the true shape of your body and face after years of avoiding yourself. She also writes about the sense of wonder in seeing women who seem completely unburdened by such concepts: “She sat in her body as if she was the only one who ever had to look at it.”

Sympathy for Wild Girls does a great job on the politics of smell too, introducing us to realistic women who do everything they can to avoid their own bodily odor and those who go to extreme lengths so that the women around them will never know they sweat. There’s a dissection of femininity and wealth inequality in every mention of odor, the author exposing the sick influence of generations of impossible, nonsensical hygiene standards on Black women in particular. McGhee also writes insightfully (and disturbingly) about memory, dreams, and the role of scent in building our futures. “I had worked retail jobs since I was thirteen, and most of them left me with some new fear or sense of disgust. I associated the smell of sizzling meat with scraping spit-logged gum off the bottom of tables in my parents’ restaurant. I was a vegetarian until my freshman year of college.”

While occasionally leaning into the speculative, these stories are deeply rooted in reality, introducing us to women whose lives are as complex as our own, women who could very easily be our neighbor, our co-worker, the woman we recognize from the coffee shop every weekday morning, or the daughter of the family who suddenly stopped coming to church last year. 

In Sympathy for Wild Girls, runaways meet religious groups with a strong social media following and a strict idea of cleanliness in the eyes of the Lord. The author writes all of this so beautifully, offering up moments of contemplation on something otherworldly before turning the volume on real life all the way up again—I’m talking about lines that felt like a sledgehammer to my solar plexus: “My mother always wanted me to be grateful for things she didn’t do to me.” And phrasing like a mother describing the idea of her baby looking just like her with the words “She felt like a mirror I pulled from my body.”

In “She Is Waiting,” we meet Ava, who began to float (needing to constantly weigh herself down with rocks to stay on the ground) after she was kidnapped from the park and held captive for a week. She was rescued, but the kidnapper was never identified or caught. Ava, who “woke up in the air, the bedsheet draping her body like a tablecloth, haunting her own bed.” Ava, who is so lonely while grappling with the complexity of surviving the kidnapping, enduring flashbacks and feeling like she’s back in that moment years after everyone’s moved on around her. 

One of my favorite stories, “Butterfruit,” weaves together the stigma and societal shifts in the acceptable frequency of hair washing, depending on whether you’re white or Black, rich or poor. Demree McGhee brilliantly incorporates threads of the main character’s compulsive coping methods—which involves both cleanliness and inhaling cleaning products (“I didn’t have real faith in anything that didn’t have the power to physically change what it was touched, the way bleach made a room simmer with absence” “I sprayed my sheets until they were wet with Lysol. I drenched my windowsill in Fabuloso, wiped my fingerprints off every surface, and got dizzy off the scent of being washed away”)— and contrasts it against her counterpart, who is part of the church’s social media team, branded ‘clean’ in all the visible forums, but messy in her secrets that begin to spill over. This story should be taught in schools! I can’t help imagining the lively discussions that the many vibrant and vital topics this story touches on will inspire in students. There are many twists in this one, and there’s a reveal that made me gasp out loud.

I’ll be thinking about “Throwing Up in a Gated Community,” the devastating story about two girls of very different social and economic classes, who fall into an intimate friendship the way many teenage girls (and many, many queer girls) do, for a long time.

Sometimes McGhee hits these poetic and thought-provoking endings that feel wholly satisfying, while other stories are concluded midway through their unraveling—when things are about to turn inside out and collapse. It’s like someone closing the door on us right as the conversation we’re eavesdropping on gets really juicy. They are not necessarily abrupt endings that leave the stories feeling unfinished but ones that leave the reader with meaning instead of resolution. Even this is testament to McGhee’s immersive writing, because each time this happens, I sat for a few minutes with all the possibilities I was sure would happen next, imagining all the ways the protagonist would mess it up or get into trouble. I always wanted more.

One of the stories that provides a reflective yet mysterious conclusion, and certainly one of my favorites of the book, is “Exchange,” following a young couple who shoplifts regularly while grocery shopping. They fall into a sweet but blurry-edged domestic polyamorous relationship with a store employee who approached them to say she’s watched them steal for a full year and wants to learn their ways, wants to get to know them. Her presence reinvigorates their relationship with each other, and for a moment in time they are thriving as a trio. But then the temptation of stealing a big-screen TV comes between them and everything they were once sure of changes in a blink.

Sympathy for Wild Girls is a book about how “the men who seek girls’ bodies like flowers to yank from the ground” have shaped generations of women, young and old. These stories explore the systemic and inescapable violence Black women are born into and how it floods into every aspect of their lives, from their self-actualization to their friendships with other women. In addition to the difficult themes I’ve mentioned above, readers should note that many of these stories include descriptions of the both the actions and mindsets of characters who experience: suicidal ideation; child abuse and neglect; domestic violence; unwanted pregnancies; abortions; a kidnapping and time in captivity; and animals being killed and dismembered. 

Demree McGhee depicts the way grief climbs into your bones and reacts chemically with the core of who you are. There are multiple stories focused on compulsive behavior, exploring body dysmorphia and disordered eating, including anorexia, bulimia, and hypergymnasia: “I would excavate the weight from my body until the bones of my throat, my shoulders, my hips breached the surface of my skin. I would carve myself into something gorgeous from all angles.”

I highly recommend Sympathy for Wild Girls for readers of color and especially queer readers of color, who will find that reading it feels comfortable in a way that is so rare. It’s effective, electric storytelling that hits different because it’s you on the page. There’s a thrilling additional level of unsettling achieved in the way the author pulls at threads she knows will make us squirm. Sympathy for Wild Girls is a privilege, an honor, a gift to the community, and a captivating collection I’d be proud and excited to recommend to friends, family members, and fans of Dr. Ally Louks. 

Thank you for reading Dr. Ally Louks’s book review of Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Samantha Hui | Content warnings: cancer

A vital memoir about the dangers of inheriting silence

S. L. Collins’ Stopping to Feel is an intimate memoir that explores the long-casted shadow of generational trauma, the complex ways we inherit emotional habits, and the courage it takes to unlearn them. At its heart, the book is an examination of grief and deep emotional suppression.

Through lyrical prose and poignant metaphors, Collins delves into the internal fractures that result when love and pain coexist unspoken. She invites readers to reflect on how much of our identity is shaped by what we avoid, and what we can become for others when we finally allow ourselves to feel.

“I was so grateful to have a dad who could fix up the physical wounds, but I wouldn’t realize for two more decades how bad he was at acknowledging and healing emotional ones.”

The memoir centers on Sasha’s relationship with her father, Boris Romanowsky, a devoted police officer admired by his community but emotionally distant at home. As a child, Sasha sees him as a strong and dependable hero, always willing to help others. But his strength doubles as a mask, hiding deep grief and a refusal to confront his own pain and past.

When he is diagnosed with a cancer that has taken the lives of many of his own family members, he faces the disease with a mix of stoicism and denial. As his illness advances, Sasha begins to recognize how his coping mechanisms of avoidance, emotional withdrawal, and constant busyness have shaped her own ways of dealing with life. In her effort to better understand her elusive father, she also uncovers troubling truths about his childhood that shed light on his behavior. The memoir follows Sasha’s path through burnout, therapy, and ultimately, forgiveness, as she strives to break generational patterns and build a healthier emotional legacy for her own children.

“I held on for dear life and kept pedaling–Dad was right, if I just kept moving, I wouldn’t crash.”

The structure of Stopping to Feel enhances its emotional resonance. Divided into four parts—Collins’ childhood and early brushes with family loss followed by her father’s colon cancer diagnosis, his recovery, and the cancer’s return—the book traces not just events but emotional evolution. Told mostly chronologically, the narrative allows readers to witness the slow unfolding of patterns that repeat over generations.

Collins’ talent lies in her ability to reveal, over time, how she and her father mirror each other, how his need to “just keep moving” becomes her own, and how both of them crash under the weight of avoidance. As the book spans decades, we also witness the cumulative effect of anxiety, showing how small emotional habits calcify into lifelong struggles. The structure allows the reader to not only see the cycle but feel how difficult it is to break.

“I remember the stories she told me, but otherwise, my memories come to me as feelings, rather than visions. Confusion. Disgust. Disbelief. Relief. Sadness. Fear. But most of all, shame.”

One of the book’s most powerful strengths is in Collins’ poetic storytelling. A particularly unforgettable image involves her father as a child landing on a stick that breaks off inside his foot, and never telling his parents out of fear of being a burden. Decades later, she wonders whether that fragment still lived inside him as he was cremated: “Did the piece of wood ignite, finally free after all those decades of being ignored?” It’s a haunting metaphor for the buried pain that defines this memoir; wounds left unspoken don’t disappear, they fester, they shape us, and sometimes they become our legacy.

“How could I parent small children and nurture their big feelings and emotions when I could barely understand my own? How could I be a loving parent and a distressed child at the same time?”

Ultimately, Stopping to Feel is about confronting grief, facing uncomfortable truths, and daring to feel in a world and a family where avoidance means survival. It’s a memoir for anyone grappling with emotional inheritance, caregiving, or the silent toll of trauma. Readers who appreciate honest explorations of mental health, family complexity, and emotional resilience will find themselves deeply moved by this story. More than anything, the book is an invitation to pause, reflect, and feel…before it’s too late.

Thank you for reading Samantha Hui’s book review of Stopping to Feel by S.L. Collins! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Jaylynn Korrell

A spy mission, high-stakes competition, and a satisfying story of girlhood

Simone LaFray is a spy, a singer, a chess player, and the teenage daughter of a world famous chocolatier. Just as she gets settled back into her impressive lifestyle in Paris, Simone and her mother are called in for a new assignment at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

The OmniKey, a device of extreme importance to their superior (Eloise), isn’t working properly, and it’s up to Simone to persuade the only person who can fix it.

This is the third book in a series following Simone, and it picks up right where book two ends. With an impressive balance of action and drama, S.P. O’Farrell captures the essence of preteen girlhood with flair and expert espionage. It’s what preteen dreams are made of.

Simone LaFray and the Bishop of Mumbai is a winning combination of the Spy Kids series and The Queen’s Gambit. Simone is competing for the Junior World Chess Championship while she’s juggling a larger spy mission. Spy teens almost always hit the mark for me, but Simone also leads a fascinating life both in and outside of her missions. You’ll be all in by the time you finish the first chapter.

I can’t think of a single preteen girl who won’t want to be in Simone LaFray’s shoes. She’s practical and successful and hard working, but she also saves time to enjoy herself. Her best friend, known as “the V,” balances out Simone’s serious nature with fun-loving quips and an endless list of things to talk about. When the V goes on about her first boyfriend, Simone is reminded that they aren’t just little girls anymore. Growing up is closer than it’s ever been.

Mumbai is the big adventure in this installment. At the Junior World Class Chess Championship, she’s tasked with finding a boy known as the Bishop, whose intelligence can help her superior Eloise get out of a sticky situation.

But things don’t go to plan when in Mumbai. She soon finds out that the Bishop isn’t anything like she imagined him to be. After talking to him briefly, she begins to question everything she’s ever known and the people she’s supposed to trust. The dynamic between the two is thrilling, and their interactions make up some of the best scenes in the book—a tall feat for a story involving a teen spy! There is so much on the line for both of them. The Bishop desperately wants to find his parents, and Simone feels pressure to complete the mission successfully; combined, their narrative provides a real edge-of-your-seat kind of reading experience.

O’Farrell succeeds not only in high-tension espionage storytelling but characterization. Simone isn’t only a spy trying to save the day, she’s also a lover of chess and an easy-to-root-for human; her partner on this mission, Harper, is complex and interesting too. Each character is given enough background through intentional dialogue and backstory that you’ll empathize with all of them.

Simone LaFray and the Bishop of Mumbai is a standalone too! Two books come before it and more will come after it (I hope), but readers get an exciting, satisfying story all on its own—along with two previous books to enjoy right after finishing this one.

Thank you for reading Jaylynn Korrell’s book review of Simone LaFray and the Bishop of Mumbai by S.P. O’Farrell! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Peter Hassebroek

Balanced storytelling and evocative descriptions elevate a seemingly implausible premise to a convincing, palpably absorbing adventure.

The stresses of entrepreneurialism are encroaching on Mark Forster’s home life. To assuage his wife and two daughters, Mark takes the family to Hawaii for a week of snorkeling and poolside relaxation. If on his own, Mark would spend the entire time scuba diving. He does pack his gear but promises to limit it to early morning trips to maximize family time.

Two days in, Mark rises early to join a scuba tour group. He isn’t enamored with its participants, particularly a younger man on a scooter with propellers. Once in the water, however, the tranquil sea life allows him to disregard the others. He shares his observations, enhanced by an almost encyclopedic level of knowledge about diving, the ocean, and its inhabitants. The real payoff comes with a tense, up-close encounter:

“Its rows of gills were fully open, giving me a ringside seat to gaze into its massive maw. Bloody hell, it was so silent. We watched with great interest as it turned and made a few passes before swimming onward.”

Only the great white doesn’t swim onward. Instead, Mark finds himself isolated, as if primed to become the shark’s prey. A disorientating hit from what he assumes is the shark, but could be the scooter, dislodges his equipment prior to losing consciousness.

When he comes to, he sees his tour boat ready to return, but it ignores him. In fact those divers are not the ones from his tour and they, along with others in the area, avoid Mark. He’s confused until realizing all they see a great white shark, but not the man inside looking out.

Abandoned, there’s nothing Mark can do but coordinate with his host. The first order of business is adapting to the complications of his new anatomy. For instance:

“My arms were now pectoral fins, which explained why I could not see them. I could control them, and they affected my orientation in the water, but I lost the fine dexterity I associated with individual finger movement. Now, it felt like I was wearing mittens all the time.”

He learns to rely on his host’s instincts for hunting and other basic survival while asserting his human will and wit to steer it to discover what’s going on, then what can be done about it. The detail in which all this is put forth earns the suspension of disbelief that makes his long passage through the Pacific Ocean, on a quest for answers and solutions, such an enjoyable read.

He struggles to ensure he and his host—with an instinctive will of its own—keep moving in his preferred direction while contending with threats along the way. Never mind the emotional toll of separation from his family. This odyssey mixes adventure and observational tour as Mark encounters sea life and sea vessels, with the episodes ranging from humorous to harrowing, from compelling to informative. Each whets one’s appetite for the next. 

Alas, there is always the fear of a letdown in how such a drama concludes, let alone is explained, especially with such a tough act to follow. But the resolutions are satisfying and, like everything else in the novel, clearly articulated.

An Ocean Life challenges one’s suspension of disbelief, then rewards it with an exciting firsthand experience that exceeds its humble title. Mark is a tour guide sharing an experience rather than merely imparting facts. The reader truly shares his wonder at seeing and experiencing things otherwise inaccessible to humans.

Thank you for reading Peter Hassebroek’s book review of An Ocean Life by T.R. Cotwell! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

In which a friendship overflows with yearning and love

“Officially a year since Nijah died. She took a deep breath and locked eyes with Kewa. “Okay. Book the taxi.”

Kewa is stalking her ex on their location-sharing app and trying to convince Tajudeen that they should go meet him. Kewa was dating this man when her sister (Nijah) died, a relationship that turned into a year of emotionally and then physically ghosting him as she retreated into her grief. In fact, she did not say a word for months.

But now she’s feeling ready—to apologize for all that time, to tell him she loves him, and to start getting remnants of her life back together. She just needs the support of her closest friend, who would do anything for her, and who can’t say no on the anniversary of Kewa’s sister—and Tajudeen’s best friend—dying. So they call a taxi… and nothing about that night goes according to plan. 

They get picked up by an “anti-bachelorette” party for a “bride-no-longer-to-be” whose groom cheated on her (and whose conversation keeps reminding Kewa and Tajudeen of things Nijah loved,) and then the cab driver messes up all their plans.

When they do finally get to the party where Kewa’s ex is, a woman begins flirting with Tajudeen while Kewa talks to her ex. The whole time, the two friends can’t keep their eyes off each other or stop talking about the other person, or—adorably and endearingly—understand that they’re in love.

I have read (really good!) romance novels that had me swooning fewer times than this short novella. It is romantic on a level we don’t see in films anymore. It’s giving that late 90s-early 2000s romantic movie energy that had us all swooning out loud. If you’re not a regular reader of swoonworthy writing—or someone with an incredible love in their life!—but you’ll know exactly what I mean when you read this book. It’s a quiet, dizzying combination of butterflies and breathlessness and the warm feeling that all is right with the world in this moment.

I must include at least one of my favorite swoony moments for you to understand what I’m talking about: “It had started as faint bells, tolling gently when Tajudeen smiled at her from across the lunch table. Then violins when Tajudeen pushed a forkful of pasta into her mouth while making unflinching eye contact. Then a base that reverberated through her whole body when Tajudeen held her hand.”

Then, what begins as heart-fluttering gorgeousness, continues to the gloriously romantic: “Tajudeen hugged her goodbye, and while her head was buried in the crook of Kewa’s neck she whispered a soft goodbye that made the choir kick in.” 

I’m going to write a sentence no one has written here before, but: I feel like Bigolas Dickolas right now. Do you remember when that person tweeted about This Is How You Lose the Time War and said “just read it.” That’s how Seeri makes me feel. Like Time War, Seeri is a short book that’s filled with emotions that leave you feeling forever changed. I still see people devastated (positively—again, romance readers will get it) just seeing one sentence quoted from Time War. Seeri is filled with lines that evoke that same powerful reaction. No description could truly capture how breathless I felt when I read some of the lines these characters say to each other and about each other. 

Seeri is perfect for readers who want a short but immensely satisfying friends-to-lovers romance; it’s for those who love to read mutual queer yearning and for readers who enjoy a little ‘everyone but these idiots can see they’re in love’ energy.

It’s also genuinely funny; I laughed out loud multiple times, especially when the author reminds us that, though this love feels timeless and eternal, the setting is modern and fresh. (I had to take a moment to laugh for real after reading the relatable girls-night-out experience of “Hi, sorry, a girl in the bathroom hasn’t gotten a text back since Wednesday so I was dealing with that.”) Without giving away too much about the love story, Seeri is also an excellent read (and the ultimate gift!) for anyone who has fallen in love with the person helping them learn their lines for a stage performance. 

The thing about Seeri that I’m most in awe of is the way Chiamaka Okike brings us into a years-long friendship—the mundane, the memories, the moments of eye-contact caught in an instant—and captures all that those years built. We’re a part of it.

I laughed and groaned with the girls during their chaotic taxi ride, I understood the vast chasms of Kewa and Tajudeen’s loss without Nijah in their lives, and I felt my breath catch at each revelation of their yet-to-be-realized romance. I’m sure I’ll read this at different stages of my life and see new sides to the story and new sides of myself in it, like holding up a crystal to the light and seeing where the rainbow reflections scatter across the room.

“…Kewa’s face. Across it she could see the artifacts of Nijah. She and Kewa used to have the same dimple on their chin, but Kewa’s had filled out the older she got. Right then Tajudeen wanted to press her thumb into it, hoping it would leave a dent so that for a moment she would be staring at her best friend’s face again.”

The author writes grief so beautifully and so authentically that you’ll see it for the multifaceted, everchanging, living thing it is. The way Okike writes Tajudeen and Kewa’s relationship feels like you are in the room with the characters, like you could reach out and touch the glowing, emotional connection surrounding them. I can’t imagine going on with life after the loss these characters experienced, and I can’t begin to guess how I’d respond to having someone so close to the person remain in my life. Seeri offers a compassionate, complicated idea of what it’s like for Kewa and Tajudeen to live without Nijah, and to be falling in love with each other along the way.

Though they’re drunk or drinking to get drunk through most of this story, and Kewa admits to overcoming a period of suicidal ideation after losing Nijah, Seeri is not a tale of two grieving people clinging to each other in a rush of pain and tangled, aching emotions that come out looking like lust. Okike shows us the love between Tajudeen and Kewa as something tender, precious, and undeniable. We see it through the eyes of those around them, and we see that it’s been blossoming for so long—each of their blooming petals reaching out toward the sun (the other person), neither of them looking up and away from their best friend for long enough to notice they’re in love. It’s really very sweet, and it’s rooted in realness. 

I loved how explicit and casual Kewa and Tajudeen’s Nigerianness is. I loved that their love exists in this liminal space of a night out, making itself known amongst the random conversations and rush of unexpected emotions. I loved that Seeri is this hopeful, messy, utterly romantic story between two people who lost the most important person in their lives, realized they’re not alone in this, and began to see what everyone else saw in their next most important relationship. 

This will be someone’s comfort read, and it will be the book someone holds onto in the hope of being loved this way. Seeri is a love story that understands how much heartache comes with being human and knows precisely how—despite everything, and sometimes because of everything—love makes our days feel sweeter. Delicately heartwrenching, and blessed with the gift of somehow making the process of giving a eulogy romantic, I’ll be thinking about author Chiamaka Okike’s writing for a long, long time.

Thank you for reading Andrea Marks-Joseph’s book review of Seeri by Chiamaka Okike! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Warren Maxwell

An adventure that pits fantastical creatures and evil forces against the virtues of a tight-knit tribe

“‘Let me take you back to the beginning. We were peaceful and happy in our desert land. But a dark wind came, opposed to the Sacred Wind.’”

A sequel to Seasons of the Blue Pearl, Warriors of the Red Wolf carries on the epic story of Mia and the Warriors of the Hilltop. After defeating the hellish Nightmare Ogre and its Groo’yo in the series’ first installment, the tribe finds itself unmoored from any land. The story begins as they follow Mia, who has the ability to hear and interpret the voice of the Sacred Wind, over mountains and across plains in search of a new home. 

After years of walking, the lonely march begins to bear fruit. They find camaraderie with other tribes and build new bonds, yet this fortune is dampened by a dark, nebulous force that hangs over the fertile lands they discover. The evil force poisons the hearts and minds of everything around it, twisting lies into truth, realities into fantasies, kindness into cruelty, and must be overcome in order for Mia and her people to make the newfound land into a peaceful home.

“‘See the dark shapes of countless ravens perched in the branches, their backs hunched as they wait patiently for the story to begin. Listen as the great raven tells the flock everything it witnessed as it soared over the Blue Pearl and watched our people’s progress.’”

This is a novel of skillfully woven together episodes and events. Each chapter spills into the next, maintaining a taut overarching narrative that provides a constant source of entertainment. Even in passages that describe Mia and the tribe’s long, nomadic journeys, there is action and adventure mixed in. 

Traveling across a mountain pass gives way to a deadly foot race when the Warriors of the Hilltop encounter another tribe. As the story pushes forward, the pace and frequency of such dramatic encounters increases, imbuing small quiet moments—gazing at the stars or listening to the winds—with a potent, much needed sense of relief and philosophical introspection. 

“‘The Sacred Wind loves our differences, just as it loves the differences among the plants and animals and all things it has created. We are not meant to be all the same!’”

The novel has a tremendous ability to whip up a storm with its prose, capturing fantastical images like that of a glowing red yarn that nurtures and encases the world, alongside gruesome acts of violence and sobering moments of sorrow and loss. When Mia, overwhelmed by the trauma of what she has already experienced, begins to wish for the quiet and silence of crossing over into another realm beyond Earth, the Blue Pearl, the book’s language captures this sincere pain with gravity and depth. This ability to fully inhabit and shift between emotional and dynamic registers sets this book apart. 

“We are Warriors but do not make war

“We are water flowing gently, nourishing the land 

“We walk the winding path and are the path itself”

At the novel’s core, establishing its emotional force, is the deep sense of values and human feeling that are endowed on the large cast of characters. Whether it be Mia, who carries the responsibility for the wellbeing of her whole tribe at a very young age, or her Uncle Ho-e, who never misses a moment to spread laughter and joy among the warriors, each central character is grounded with a palpable sense of love and compassion for the world around them. This is embodied in the framing device that governs the novel—somewhere in the future, Uncle Ho-e is recounting the story of the tribe’s exploits to the next generation, ensuring that the children know of their ancestor’s sacrifices and remain connected to that legacy. This goodhearted instinct to respect and preserve the memories of others runs through the story and makes for a deeply resonant reading experience. 

A poignant and epic adventure of a tribe searching for a land to call their own, Warriors of the Red Wolf speaks to the power of love, family, and righteousness even in the face of a dark, nihilistic force.

Thank you for reading Warren Maxwell’s book review of Warriors of the Red Wolf by Nicholas Varner! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

An extraordinary collection about everyday life

Ted Virts explores themes of family, religion and everyday experience in Window and Mirror. He does so with an affectionate and affecting humanity, and he’s equipped with the keen ear of the great poet.

The author’s introduction, in setting out his goal with these poems, inadvertently spells out what modern poetry is all about: noticing small moments, believing that there is a “sacredness to everyday life.” But Virts goes further, enlarging his scope by explicitly posing existential questions, asking whether we matter or not in this universe of galaxies upon galaxies.

The opening poem entitled “Presence/Absence” is perfectly placed to set the tone of this collection. Just observe, pleads the poet, and the wonders of seeming mundanity will reveal themselves. The recurring refrain of the word “Sit” is accompanied by double spaces, so allowed to ring out through the poem’s reverberant lines. 

In “Pandemics,” Virts carries the tradition of quoting a line from the news to which the poem then responds. It is about a pig pandemic, allowing the poet to indulge in much delightfully clever wordplay about pig figures of speech. Delightful cleverness continues in a poem that takes the Cartesian cliché “I think therefore I am,” twisting and stretching it to reveal various meanings.

Many of these poems struggle with Christianity, even using Jesus as a speaking character. If not religiously inclined, most will find this theme yielding the weakest results but not without its successes. The enjambed titled, “Thoughts about Jesus: Yarn,” with its compelling rhythm, makes one wonder if its ternary structure is meant to symbolize the Trinity, and the sixteen word long “Rainbow” is a marvel of concision in Biblical commentary.

The family motif of the collection is centered around the father. Not the father figure or the Father, but rather a particular father, albeit an evidently regular one. Through the poems we see glimpses of scenes from his life with his children, his aging and his death. “Downstream” is a moving, beautiful poem about Alzheimer’s disease, offering words for what pain can make unspeakable.

In “Sacred Acts,” Virts reframes modern safety gestures, like putting on a seatbelt, as motions of prayer, drawing parallels that will stick with the reader. Elsewhere, the fashionable exercise of the kettlebell swing is viewed as the ticking of a clock. The trappings of modern life are held up in contrast or connection to things that one perceives as deeper.

The poet’s best work comes in the form of two poems about trees, or, rather, about these trees being like their observer, or their observer being like the trees. It’s a simple metaphor, but these poems are elevated to small masterpieces by their language. The opening of “Near The Border” draws a wide picture of the Mesquite tree, its “ragged arms drifting green / scratch a half-circle in sky,” and bird song leads off to the sunset, where meaning meets diction and rhythm. The other tree poem, “Ocotillo,” should be experienced unspoiled. It is a bolt from the blue, electrifying in the way only the greatest poetry can be. 

As in its many astonishing moments, Window And Mirror borders on the miraculous.

Thank you for reading Nikolas Mavreas’s book review of Window and Mirror by Ted Virts! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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Reviewed by Melissa Suggitt

Imagine a world where your own thoughts can betray you and the enemy within is far more terrifying than the enemy outside.

“My name is Dray Quintero. I’m not the monster they claim.”

With this bold declaration, Michael C. Bland pulls us back into the heart-stopping dystopian world of this explosive trilogy. If you thought things were intense before, buckle up, because the author might have saved his best for last.

After a brutal, failed uprising against a tyrannical government, our hero Dray Quintero isn’t just imprisoned, he’s trapped within his own mind. Thanks to invasive neural technology disturbingly similar to the real-life Neuralink, Dray is tormented by relentless mental manipulations by the ruthless Agency. He chillingly remarks “The Agency had not only imprisoned my body, they’d hijacked my brain, repeatedly warping it.”

Set against the grim aftermath of the catastrophic OCB1 virus, America is now a shadow of its former self under Authoritarian rule, dominated by mandatory implants originally intended as salvation, now twisted into tools of absolute control. Dray, once a celebrated engineer whose innovations inadvertently fueled this dystopian nightmare, is now branded a traitor and enemy of the state. Throughout the story, his desperate quest to escape captivity, rescue his daughters Raven and Talia, and dismantle the surveillance monstrosity he originally built, fuels every adrenaline-packed page.

His daughters are pivotal to the emotional heartbeat of this novel. Raven is dynamic— scarred yet fierce and unyielding, driven by the unrelenting need for freedom—but Talia’s story captivates the most. Despite devastating injuries and forced participation in cruel experiments, she undergoes a compelling transformation. Initially a victim, she gradually learns to navigate and undermine The Agency’s network from within, declaring defiantly, “They totally whiffed things. They plugged me into their system…I’ve got fingers in the whole soup.” Talia’s arc evolves from passive victim to cunning adversary, reflecting the powerful resilience and adaptability of the human spirit in the face of tyranny.

Author Michael C. Bland’s characters are multi-dimensional, with unique quirks, personalities, and complexities that keep readers questioning their allegiances. Zion Calloway, Dray’s former friend and now merciless Agency leader, perfectly captures how easily power corrupts, coldly justifying his actions: “If you saw, you’d agree, though I’m not sure you’d have the stomach.” Kieran, an enhanced Agent struggling between calculated brutality and uncomfortable moments of humanity, along with Mina, Dray’s complicated and guilt-ridden wife, enrich the narrative’s moral landscape, reminding us how easily good intentions can be corrupted.

Perhaps most unsettling about the narrative is its uncanny resonance with today’s geopolitical tensions. Issues of invasive governmental surveillance, widespread misinformation, and civil unrest aren’t just fiction—they mirror the headlines we see daily. It feels eerily prophetic, turning speculative fiction into something unsettlingly close to reality.

The pacing is flawless too. Exhilarating action coupled with moments of profound reflection keep readers locked in. Bland’s portrayal of family dynamics under intense pressure is genuine and impactful, perfectly balancing edge-of-your-seat thrills with emotional authenticity.

The Price of Freedom isn’t just a fitting end to a gripping trilogy; it’s a provocative exploration of our present-day fears about freedom, power, privacy, and the ethical dilemmas posed by technology’s relentless advance with limited checks and balances. As you race toward the finale, ask yourself this: How far would you go to protect democracy and bodily freedom when both are threatened? And where would you draw the line between safeguarding liberty and becoming the very thing you fear?

Thank you for reading Melissa Suggitt’s book review of The Price of Freedom by Michael C. Bland! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

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